The turbe by the “Vampirica” in Podgorica
Figure 1: Left: the “Vampirica” building (through the trees) and the end of the park area; center and downstairs: the turbe
Once there lived a vampiress by the ghost of a graveyard… This is not that story, but a post on a picture I snapped last week on an all-too-brief visit to Podgorica, Montenegro. It’s one I should have taken many years ago, but I didn’t bring a camera when I was first shown the memorial in the shape of a turbe (mausoleum for a Muslim saint) in the Pobrežje park across the road from the Vampirica building in Podgorica.
The “Vampiress” is so called because it looks down on the site of an old Muslim graveyard, unceremoniously razed for progress and now a park area. A Muslim initiative asked for a memorial to be put up, at least, and one was promised, but the park initially opened without one in 1999, sparking Muslim protests (Hodžić 2000, 50). But by the time I visited in early 2004, the memorial was up, or rather, down: it is half hidden from view, as it has been sited halfway down a staircase on the slope off the edge of the park across the street. It’s a nice staircase. But the effect is that only the roof of the turbe rises above ground level as seen from the park. Rather petty of the authorities.
The Pobrežje park centers a different memorial: to all the victims of the 1991–2001 wars in the former Yugoslavia, may they never happen again (figure 2). And given the weight and relevance of this dedication, it may indeed be fitting for the turbe to be less prominent. But the war victims’ monument is in any case located at the park’s central point, where two diagonal paths form a cross, while the turbe is off in a corner; and the former is elevated on a platform, so there is no need to depress the latter.
Figure 2: War victims’ memorial
My interest in this half-buried memorial to a burial place is in what it can tell us about religious territoriality and how group control of a territory is inscribed in architecture and landscaping. More specifically, it nicely illustrates how symbolic dominance manifests at shared sites in the model that Robert M. Hayden (2002, 2013, 2016) has termed “antagonistic tolerance.”
Hayden’s model seeks to capture what goes on where religious sites mingle in a shared landscape in an apparent spirit of tolerance, as they do in many places in the Balkans. He suggests that this tolerance and sharing is conditional on inequality, on the dominance of the leading group; destructive violence happens when dominance is threatened and equality breaks out. I’m not out to defend this contested thesis (see e.g. the responses in Hayden 2002) or its provocative policy implications. But the model provided a correction to many naïve treatments of religious site-sharing that was striking and salutary back in the 2000s, and it fruitfully directs attention to how dominance finds symbolic expression in religious sites and the restrictions placed on them under regimes of toleration. Under Ottoman rule, for example, churches were not supposed to rise higher than mosques. The lowering of the turbe in Pobrežje exhibits a similar pattern.
What makes it an interesting addition to the list of such sites is that it is only vaguely “religious.” Neither of the two monuments sharing the park is dedicated to religion, but they are dedicated to the dead, around which religion ever flitters. The graveyard memorial is shaped like a religious shrine, but signifies importance to a particular community, not the presence of a buried saint. The war-victim memorial comes across as secular and inclusive of all ex-Yugoslav communities, if one doesn’t read too much into its placement at a crossroads and the way its shape merely evokes a cross. Rather than between Christianity and Islam as such, the configuration perhaps expresses something like the power relation between the civil religion of a dominant secularized Christian-majority nation-state and that of a secularized Muslim national minority, tolerated but symbolically kept in its place.
Religio-political fault lines
As it happens, I was in Montenegro for a discussion on how to do responsible journalism on religion in a challenging security landscape. The young Nato member and EU candidate is potentially vulnerable to Russian information warfare if and when Putin should want to destabilize the Balkans to create a distraction, and religion – specifically control of religious sites – is a flashpoint with proven mobilizing potential on Montenegrin streets, including potential for violence.
In Europe today, polarization over religion is often directly or indirectly about Muslim minorities. The main religio-political fault line in Montenegro over the past decades, however, does not run between the Eastern Orthodox majority and the nearly one-fifth Muslim minority. It runs within the Orthodox majority, between the still-predominant Serbian Orthodox Church and supporters of an autocephalous Montenegrin Orthodox Church, largely as a proxy for the contest over the ethno-linguistic identity of the country’s Orthodox (Serbs or Montenegrins) and over the political direction of the state (East or West).
The population was 19.1% Muslim in the 2011 census; the 2023 census is ongoing as I write.
The country’s Muslims are indigenous to the region, and largely identify as Bosniaks or Albanians in ethnic terms; Bosniaks essentially share the same mother tongue with Montenegrins/Serbs. Muslim representatives have by and large skillfully navigated the political shoals of recent history as patriots of independent Montenegro and a necessary ingredient in coalition governments. Muslims in Montenegro are integrated and tolerated (though perhaps “antagonistically”).
Figure 3: The turbe defaced with fresh graffiti
This is not to say that Montenegrin Muslims have not faced hostility, from the legendary massacre of converts to the “Turkish” faith celebrated in the national poem, to the actual 19th- and early 20th-century reconquista of the country, to repression linked with the war on their Bosnian kin in the 1990s. Nor is it to say that there is no intolerance or potential for further polarization that could be exploited today. Indeed, when I took my photos, the turbe had sadly been recently vandalized (as reported in early November), with grafitti redolent of Serb nationalism as well as local soccer hooliganism.
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The tetragram with what looks like semi-circles is an originally Byzantine motif turned Serbian national symbol, and is frequently (mis)represented as consisting of four С’s (Cyrillic S’s), standing for the nationalist slogan samo sloga Srbina spasava, “only unity saves the Serb.” (I have used mathematical symbols here for lack of mirrored C or β characters.)
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The tetragram with “1987” is the symbol of the Varvari (Barbarians), the “ultras” rooting for the football club Budućnost Podgorica (est. 1987).